Truths about marriage (no one tells you)

What can you expect from sleeping with the same woman for (if you’re lucky) 50 years?

What can you expect from sleeping with the same woman for (if you’re lucky) 50 years? A guide to the most important, least discussed institution you’ll ever be a part of.

1. It’s a big deal – People will tell you it’s not as dramatic a change as you’d think. They’ll say that if you’ve lived with your girlfriend, you pretty much know what it’s like already. They’ll say it’s not a big deal. These people are lying to you.

2. You have no idea what you’re getting yourself into – Marriage is a leap of faith. Because you’re not just marrying your wife. You’re marrying your wife in five years, 10 years, 40 years. You’re marrying her when she loses her job, or goes through a depression, or decides to go back to school to become a website designer, or falls asleep again with the kids while you’re downstairs waiting to watch a movie with her on the couch. And the same goes for her, with you. Only more so.

5. Five other things you should never say to your wife – By Drew Magary 1. “Fuck you” (sincere version) Obviously, saying it in jest is justdandy. I did it six times just now. 2. “You’re not my mother” I’ve said this to my wife a couple oftimes and her reaction has alwaysbeen unfavourable. 3. “Huh?” Oh, so you weren’t listening to anything she said. 4. “I mean, we saw your parents just last month, didn’t we?” You hate her parents. You just announced it. 5. “Come here. Let me give you a hug” (when she’s pissed) Angry women hate being smothered with affection. It’s like shooting abear with a BB gun and then trying to cuddle it. Not that your wife is a bear.

6. You’ll forget what it’s like to be single.

7. And that won’t really bother you because you’ll start to find single people weird – Getting married is like joining an all-consuming new religion. Imagine if your best friend became a Mormon or a Jain. You’d both want to go out for dinner, prove how it’s not such a big difference after all, how the commonality of your friendship and your love of cricket is bigger than believing in God-delivered messages to Joseph Smith on gold plates that were buried in the ground. And you will have that dinner, drink a couple of beers. It may not dawn on you until weeks or even months later, but eventually, it’ll occur to you that you’re no longer speaking the same language. You’ll be kind of amazed at the stuff your single friends spend their time worrying about – she had no idea how to make a perfect old-fashioned! She asked me for dinner, but I have tickets to see a Journey tribute band – and you’ll struggle to remember what it was like not to be married. And you will think: on balance, not as good.

8. But as soon as your wife is out of town, you’ll call your single friend and make him go out and get drunk with you.

9. And your single friends will dread those nights off – When he is expected to compress months’ worth of pent-up bachelorhood into a single night.

10. Also: Don’t say you ‘got the night off’. That’s pathetic.

11. You might get bored.

12. When bored, you might fantasize about banging the cleaning lady. And that is within the range of normal.

13. But then you won’t be bored – Suddenly sex with your wife will be like sex with someone you don’t know. Kissing your wife will literally feel like kissing her in the first moments you ever met, when you were excited to find out that she even existed. There’s a real lesson in this. You don’t know what’s going to happen in marriage, which from the outside would appear to be the absolute most static human state. Because from the inside, marriage is dynamic, challenging, and from one day to the next mixes the high and the low in such a cocktail that half the time you can’t tell if you’re drunk or hungover.

14. You will learn that her feelings are real! You’re going to think, from time to time, that your wife is crazy. The only reason we don’t realize that most people are crazy is that we’re not married to most people. But here’s the key: don’t tell her she’s crazy. Not only that: stop thinking she’s crazy. Treat her irrational feelings as rational, because that’s how they feel to her. It’s called compassion. And marriage is one of the few ways we ever really learn it.

15. You will need to get home at night – Marriage is about a lot of things, but mainly it’s about showing up. Showing your wife that this thing right here – dinner, dessert, bath and bedtime; buying diyas during Diwali; a flu shot – is the most important thing going on.

16. It may not be a bad idea to schedule sex, seriously – On the one hand, it sounds like the death of all that is worth living for. Scheduled sex? What’s next? Scheduled smiles? But bear with us: it is easy to fall out of the habit, especially if you have kids. You get busy; you get tired. Suddenly you look up and you haven’t been laid in four months. This is not good. Your brain is in danger of absorbing a dangerous idea: I can live without sex. Sex, in addition to feeling good and keeping you from murdering people who annoy you, is good for things like intimacy with your spouse. And scheduling it is a way to make sure that intimacy doesn’t get away from you.

This is an excerpt from an article that appeared in GQ India's November 2012 issue.